 Live from Orlando, Florida. It's theCUBE. Covering.conf18, brought to you by Splunk. Welcome back to Splunk.conf18. Hashtag Splunk.conf18, as you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm with my co-host, Stu Miniman. We're going to take a cruise with the data. Kurt Persot is here. He's the director of IT for Guest Technology at Carnival Cruise Line. So he's the ship and Ariel Molina is here. He's the senior director of web development and enterprise architecture at Carnival Cruise Line. He's the shore. Gents, welcome to theCUBE. Good to see you. Happy to be here. Very, very. It's for having us guys. Dave, Dave, I see what you did there. Pretty good, how well. This is kind of, you know, Splunk is known for a little tongue-in-cheek. Let's keep this interview on course. So Arnold, you got it. So Arnold Donald, your CEO was on stage today with Doug Merritt, a very inspirational individual. You guys are an amazing company. You see those ads and just go, wow, just makes you want to go. It's fun. But Ariel, let's start with you. You're kind of your role. What you guys are doing here. Let's kick it off for us. So, no, it's fantastic. Great to be here. I think great energy in the conference today. The keynote was fantastic. It was great to see our CEO up there and really represent our company. Really talk about sort of where we're heading and how Splunk helps us along that journey when it comes to data. Things are changing. We fast every day, right? We're pressured into delivering more value, delivering innovation at a faster pace. And Splunk is a key enabler of that for us, right? And Kurt, you, at any one point in time, you guys said you have 250,000 guests on the seas around the world. Wow, and everybody wants to be connected these days. So that's kind of your purview, right? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, like five, 10 years ago, what Soul Cruises was the ability to be disconnected. You know, right now, people want to be connected more than ever. So what we try to do beyond just like the connectivity and giving them better bandwidth and stuff like that, was to try to develop products on board that helps them be connected, be social, but not miss out on the product that we're actually selling, which is the ship, the people, the crew, and the actual entertainment and the staff on board, right? So we're trying to make people social but not anti-social with some of the technologies that we're bringing on board as well. Doug Merritt said today we're all data emitters. And I think the number was, you guys will service 13 million guests in any given year. So a huge, huge number of data emitters. And of course, Ariel, you obviously are analyzing a lot of data as well. So how has the use of data changed over the years at Carnival? Maybe you could kind of take us through that. Well, ultimately, I think it's about personalizing the experience, right? So how do we use the data to better understand what folks are looking for in that guest journey? So we call the guest journey everything from planning, on a voyage, purchasing a voyage, purchasing all the data, all of the auxiliary items that are up for sale, and then ultimately making it into the ship. So what we're doing these days is mining this data and looking for opportunities, you know, on the dot-com side of things. Obviously it's about resiliency and personalization, right? How do we deliver innovation through multiple releases and then do so in a resilient way? And a lot of those innovations typically are on personalization. And we see that move the needle, right? We see that, we're incentivized to have more folks book online, right? That's ultimately good for the bottom line. So data's a big part of that, personalization, resiliency. Yeah, it's one of those interesting things we look at, most people probably think of cruise ships as like, oh, well, your vacation and transportation, everything like that. You're a technology company now, you're tied in, you've got multiple mobile apps before and during, maybe bring us a little bit inside, what's that like? Over the past three years, we've seen a great transformation in terms of the technologies that we're bringing on board. I mean, you name it in terms of whether it's very high-end tools like Splunk and other APM tools that we use to cut an edge technology like AI, chatbots, facial recognition, we're using a full breadth of all these innovation in terms of technology to try to enhance guest experience. And to Ariel's point, the focus is really on trying to be very personal, trying to personalize this information, trying to personalize your guest experience and using all those data points that we're capturing to really target what a custom experience looks for you. It's really interesting because one of the things that we try to do in that personalization is try to manage those micro moments. So we're trying to get you what you want, we're trying to get you the feedback that you need in that micro moment so that you can do your transaction and move on to you and join your cruise. There's something that you mentioned, you want a balance that you want people to take advantage of what's there. You said, you used to think of vacations like this, you disconnect yourself, help understand that balance. You'd be surprised. So we were just recently in a cruise, my family and we, and we don't cruise as often as you would imagine because you work at the company, but when you do, it feels good to be a customer, right? And there's so much activity going on on a ship on a given day, right? It's very hard to understand where to be at a certain point, a certain point of time. And some people find that overwhelming. So what things like the app does, right, is really allow you to curate your day to say, hey, you like music, let's focus on events that are music oriented and that's going to be in location X, Y, and Z on the ship and they're going to be sequenced. So I mean, that's personalizing the experience, but it's also sort of ensuring that folks are really taking advantage of the full product. So that's technology. From our perspective, the technology should be kind of like in the background, it's more complimentary. The real product is really the ship, right? The crew members, the activities, the entertainment on board. That's the product we really want people to kind of like really connect to. The stuff that we do is auxiliary in terms of like, hey, let me help you get those, make maximize those experiences on board. And that's what we're really trying to do. If we can get that done and accomplished, then we've done our jobs. So the app is the digital conduit to the physical experience. If you have a good app, it makes all the difference in the world. I mean, if you're at Disney and you're trying to figure out what's next, what are the lines look like? You've got a lot of people on a ship and you want to prioritize it. You'll feel like curating your experience. So it's all about the app, as they say. What's the state of the app? I mean, the first, you know, the 1.0 probably needed a little work. Where are you now in the evolution of the app? So we're like in a 2.0 release version of it. And the original version, we started with kind of like what we call the meat and potatoes. The very basic stuff that hey, where can I get food? You know, what is the entertainment line up for today? We started off with some innovation in terms of being able to generate. We did a chat, kind of like communication so that people can chat with their families on board without having to purchase a plan or having any bandwidth needs. And then as we evolve that, then we start to go into things that are more transactional. So you're able to purchase your photos digitally through the app. We leverage facial recognition software so that if a photographer on the ship takes a picture of you, it recognizes that issue and it puts your photo in your photo stream and your photo album. So very, very convenient. We do things like sell short excursions in terms of transactional stuff. You can sit at the pool and say, oh, tomorrow's a port day, I'm going to be in the Bahamas. Let me see what short excursion I want to do and you can do it directly from the app before even moving. So now, as we evolve that, now as Ariel said, now we're trying to leverage all that data now to go beyond the transactions and make things even more personalized. So I know that your favorite casino, maybe you're a spa person, you want a facial, will target you and we say, hey, on your previous cruise you did this, let's target you because we might have something special waiting for you on board. And then carry that across the journey, right? So now they leave our ships and how do we get them to come back to our ships? How do you create that conversation that's ongoing notifications about what's going on on our ships? People follow their favorite cruise director. People follow a lot of the unique experiences there. How do you bring that to the online, to the dot-com experience so that when they're thinking about that next cruise, they can remember what that last cruise was about and they can know what's happening in each one of our ships in real time, so. It's a journey and technology definitely is a huge enabler for us to the experience, so. So what's the data architecture look like? I mean, we always talk in the cube about the innovation sandwich of the future. It used to be Moore's law. Doubling every two years, okay, great. Now it's data plus machine intelligence and you scale with the cloud. What's your data architecture look like? Well, I think it's early days. I think it's really, I mean, they're all over the place, right? I think there's silos within the enterprise that are really maximizing data. I think that trend continues to happen, but I think there's got to be, and in the enterprise architecture world, it's sort of wrangling that and figuring out how the value, how data from different dispersed touchpoints affect that. So it's early days. I do think that you're starting to see the machine learning algorithms do play a part. I'm seeing it personally more in the operation side of the world, right? So all these systems at the end of the day that need to be resilient, they need to have high service levels, right? So what I'm seeing now is tools and it's blunt, you saw that today, being able to really be predictive about where the anomalies are, right? So traditionally you were having to log errors and then interpret errors and then that will be the way you action some of these things. The predictive nature of some of these tools are such that you're being proactive, right? So again, when you talk about data, there's so many different places you can go. You think about our technology stack and that guest experience point of view. It's all about really maintaining that SLAs, resolving issues as quickly as possible and there's a ton of data in that space, right? I mean, it's everywhere. There's a ton of signals. When you guys know, we tend not to throw stuff away in technology. You sort of have to figure out how to integrate, right? A single view of the customer is probably one of those, right, as well, right? So at the end of the day, what more information are we collecting about our guest to ultimately personalize that experience? So it's centered around that. That's challenging. I mean, you know, look at the airlines and your app, which you love, the airline apps. I mean, you're now like tethered to them. But the phone experience and even the laptop experience are a little bit different. It's because of the data. It's very, very challenging. Have you figured that out or are you sort of figuring that out? In terms of making that a single experience? That's APIs, right? It's that experience API layer, right? Being able to activate that data, which is sitting in distinct silos and then do so across those experience apps, the experience channels, which is .com, the app. I mean, the chat bot, then there's so many interfaces out there. But yeah, it's a solid, mature API strategy that's going to get us there, right? And I think one of the things that our challenge is, as technology partners, is the ability to kind of like build those platforms so that the next wave of conversions, as you mentioned, there's some disjointed experience across like the desktop view versus the mobile view, is to try to bring those conversions together. And in order to do that, like Ariel said, maybe making some API extraction layers, figuring out how to mine the data better, figuring out how to leverage insights from different tools or machines and sensors. We have a ton of sensors on the ships as well, and bringing all those things together to be able to put us in a position that when we do finally get a seamless conversion, we're ready for it from a technology and a platform perspective. All right, so it's obviously, it's obvious why data is important for your business. You actually did a press release with Splunk. Maybe explain a little bit of how Splunk Cloud fits into this discussion we've been having. Well, I mean, Cloud really removes the barriers, right, of experimentation, right? So right size, how do you right size a problem you don't understand very well, right? I think Cloud really helps with that. So we're looking forward to being able to, you know, be flexible. It's flexibility in architecture, flexibility in infrastructure. So that's absolutely the use case. I think security's got a number of use cases. You see it every day in the news, right? So yeah, more opportunities, I would say, it's scale, it's that flexibility that's taking us the Cloud route. Well, when you think Splunk, you think security, you got guys in the knock, that's not where you guys are. You're kind of closer to the business. Right, right. And so you're seeing Splunk, as I said before, permeate into other parts of the organization. Absolutely. You kind of expected somebody else to do that, I don't know, the Hadoop guys, and it's interesting. Splunk never used to talk about big data. Now that the big data era is sort of behind us, Splunk talks a lot about big data, it's kind of an interesting flip. I would say democratizing the data. That's the stuff that I liked, that I heard today, right? How do you get these tools away from the IT operators that are writing these complex queries to get insights? And how do you elevate that up to the analyst and the product managers? And how do they get access to those interfaces? You know, drag and draw, whizzy way, whatever you want to call it. But I think that's kind of where I see this happening. More so than machine learning that's great and predictive, but just empowering others to really leverage that data. So I would say Splunk is leading there. It's good to see some of that stuff today. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's putting the power where it really needs to be. Whereas it's the end users, the guys that make the decisions, it's the product owners, it's the product managers, that are making those slight tweaks to that interface or to that design or to that experience that makes a difference, right? And that's what we're trying to do and leverage with tools like Splunk as well. Even the simple visualization, right? Even the stuff that's out of the box is really important for the business user, right? Absolutely. The out of the box part is another thing that I saw today which is more sort of curating for a particular use case and saying, hey, we're going to build that end to end and really turn that on and activate it a little sooner, right? So that infrastructure product we saw today, I think that's a big step forward. Where, you know, you're a platform, but at some point, you're going to have to start being a little more vertical in the way that you bring to market, the way they did with security. And Doug talked about, you know, Doug Merritt, that is, talked about data is messy and the messiest landscape, you know, is the data. And then he talked about being able to sort of organize that data in the moment. So I think about, okay, just put it in the, we like to call it data ocean, right? And just capture it. But then having the tools to be able to actually look at it in whatever schema you want, you know, when you want it is a challenge that people have. I mean, my question is, did he describe it accurately? I think yes, but then can you actually do that with this messy data? Yeah, I mean, I think it's a great concept. I'm interested to see how that plays out, you know, going forward. But I think, you know, in our world, like I mean, we have several use cases where that makes sense. You know, we have a very captive audience for seven to 10 days. So we really have a very limited amount of time to make a really good impression. So it's not only about attracting for some cruisers trying to get a repeat cruiser. So that limited timeframe that we have to kind of like leave a really lasting impression is very limited. So things like, hey, recovery in terms of getting metrics or data real time and being able to act on it immediately. Say you had a bad experience at the sushi bar. If that, we're able to grab that information, whatever, you know, data points that allow us to understand what happened and then do a quick recovery, we may have a guess for repeat cruise, right? You know, those are the things that we're trying to do. And if what Doug is saying is something that they've, you know, kind of solved or are able to try to kind of solve it in a good way, that is very powerful for us as well. And we've definitely seen leverage in that. Last question, Aaron, you saying off camera, it's kind of early days. Yeah, yeah. What's the future hold? I mean, it's going to blow our minds, blow our minds. Blow our minds. Oh, it's the predictive thing, right? It's bringing your favorite drink before, you know, you're ready to have it or something. I don't know. It's really, it's, you know, the cruise line business, the travel and hospitality space is a very fun space to work in, right? We get to really see, you know, our guests enjoy the product. And us as technologists, we get to see how technology moves the needle. So, continued innovation, right? If you're in the development side of the world, challenging yourself to deploy more often, to deliver more value more often. And if you're in the data side, how to aggregate and compile this data for ultimately what we're looking for, which is to enhance the guest experience. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that real-time notion that you were talking about, Kurt, you could see that coming together and completely transforming the guest experience. So guys, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. It was great to have you. Thank you. Thank you guys. Congratulations on all your success. Thank you. Good luck. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back at Splunk Conf 18. You're watching theCUBE, Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. We're right back. Cool.